I finish the story and George stares at me with wide eyes. We sit facing each other in the fading light of his bedroom. George is still in the wardrobe, and I’m sitting on the pillow on the hard floor.
“Why does he tell you these sad things about his life?” George asks, climbing out of the wardrobe and into my lap.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “I just write them down as I remember them best I can.”
“It must be because it has something to do with Narnia. But I don’t know exactly what,” George says.
“Perhaps, but I’m not sure, really, if even he knows. I think he just wants to give me something to bring home to you.”
“It’s more than that. You know, sister, the children in Narnia are away from their parents too, just as poor Jack was in boarding school. Maybe . . .”
“Padraig said the same thing and—”
“Padraig?”
I brush my hand through the air. “No one. But I don’t think Mr. Lewis wants us to do that, to assign the things of his life to the things of his story. I think, if I’m guessing right, he wants us to see that stories are all tangled together. Like physics theories that are true and contradictory at the same time.”
“Does that happen?”
“Yes, it does.”
“Like I can be brave and scared at the same time.” George stands up and stretches, and I rise also.
“Yes, like that.”
“What else did he tell you before you left?”
“When he finished I asked him what happened to Oldie and he told me . . .” I pause, because maybe this isn’t something George needs to know, but then I decide that truth is always the best. “Oldie ended up in an insane asylum. And I told Mr. Lewis it sounded like he right well should have been there all along. Then Mr. Lewis grinned and those eyes of his sparkled, and he said he jolly well should have been. I told him I hoped that wasn’t what all of his schooling had been like, because I love Oxford, and how horrible it would be if school was always awful for him. And he told me, George, he told me with his chin lifted in the air that it wasn’t all bad, because his next stories are about the Knock and Norse mythology.”
“What’s the Knock?”
“We’ll find out,” I say and brush his hair off his pale forehead. “But not now.”
With that, George climbs into bed with the bag that holds the sketchpad and pencils. He spills the colored pencils onto the bright quilt and lets out a sound of glee.
I watch him. The thing is, I want a miracle for George. I want something or someone like Aslan to prowl through the door and save us, save us from the sorrow and the pain and the absolute loneliness of it all.
But no one had saved young Jack.
When George starts drawing, I slip from the room, taking my notebook of Mr. Lewis’s stories with me, tucking it into my school bag. I make my way into the kitchen to find Mum sitting at the table, staring straight out the window. Concern has deepened the lines of her forehead.
When I touch her shoulder, she jumps before she lifts her gaze to me.
“Darling.”
“Mum.” I sit down next to her and she blows her nose into a handkerchief, crumples it into the palm of her hand. “Where’s Dad?” I ask.
“He comes home so late now. It’s hard for him to be here because he can’t fix things, and he’s a man who fixes things. He loves us so much, but he doesn’t know how . . .” She pauses with her hands knotted so tightly that I reach over to undo them, to loosen her grip on herself.
“Are you okay?” I ask, although it is most likely the stupidest question I can utter. Of course she isn’t.
“I don’t think you should read your brother any more of those stories.” She says this without inflection, in a cold way that makes me shiver.
“Why?”
“I heard you today. That was a scary story. There’s no reason George needs to know about a young boy losing his mother or going to a dreadful boarding school. That is just awful, and I want George to be happy, to hear good stories.”
“But it is a good story, because that same boy grows up to be the man who wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It’s a good story I am telling George because Jack was brave, and he became the man who . . .” I don’t know how to articulate what I mean so I sit quietly for a minute.
We both do.
“Mum, all fairy tales have a bad part. They all have a scary part. George knows that. It helps him to know that.”
Mum listens and I forge ahead even though I don’t really know where I’m going, but the words are rising, nevertheless. “Mr. Lewis has been telling me stories to write down for my brother, but maybe, now that I look at it, they’re also stories for me. He doesn’t say what he means by them. He just tells little tales of his life, and when I leave, somehow I know more about the world and my own life. I don’t know quite how to explain it. He once said to me that he’d never wanted to grow up because his father made it look so dreary. Adulthood frightened him, but then there it was—thrust upon him.”
“I haven’t read his book yet,” Mum says. “I will. What is it really about, Megs?”
“It’s about four children who have to go to the countryside during the war—”
She interrupts me with a sound that is halfway between an uh and an oh. “I remember all of that. Operation Pied Piper they called it. I remember so clearly. You were about seven years old, and I kept imagining what it would be like if we lived in London and I had to send you away.” She shudders.
“Well, that’s how the book starts—four children are sent away to live in the house of a professor. They find a wardrobe that leads to a land called Narnia. They are to be kings and queens but they don’t yet know that, and there they have all kinds of adventures with talking animals and a witch and a faun and a lion named Aslan.”
“That’s what he talks about the most,” Mum says. “Aslan.”
“Yes, I think he’s God . . . or maybe supposed to be God. But Mr. Lewis doesn’t actually say. Anyway, the children become kings and queens and it’s beautiful, really. I don’t want to give too much away because I want you to read it.”
Mum nods and then stands. She walks to the counter where I notice, just then, that a pot of stock is boiling. She drops bite-size pieces of potatoes into it, then turns to me. “Megs, forgive me for saying you shouldn’t tell your brother stories. You tell him anything Mr. Lewis tells you. I don’t know the right answer to anything these days.”
“Neither do I, Mum. I don’t know if anyone does. Only math problems seem to have right and wrong answers, far as I can tell lately.”
She almost laughs, then she holds out her hand for me to take. I stand and go to her and hold her hand in my own. She squeezes my fingers before she lets go to chop the carrots.
Because even with the dark parts and the light parts and the good parts and the bad parts, dinner must still be served.